Some of the Rosaria were still on the needles at the Yarn Ball. See the knitter on the right in the front row of the group picture? I ran into her the next day at Pearl Fiber Arts. She had finished her knitting, blocked it on the hotel rug (no pins, even!) and was wearing it when I saw her. That’s dedication!

I made it to five shops on Thursday, and three on Friday. I saw more Rosaria along the way.

The first completed shawlettes from the Rose City Yarn Crawl Mystery Knit Along are rolling in. You can see them in the Ravelry project pages here.

Here’s my original design knit of this shawlette.

I designed this last fall for the Rose City Yarn Crawl. I’ve had to keep it under wraps until now, since it was a mystery. Now that we’re finishing up the KAL, it’s time for the reveal.

Rainy gray skies, a band of roses, a scattering of leaves, the hint of a spider’s web, or are those sun rays amid the rain? How very Portland.

The shawlette’s name is Rosaria, as in the Mythical Realm of Rosaria, Portland’s beloved land of make-believe. The word Rosaria is the plural of rosarium, or rose garden. I like the way the plural sounds, and it’s very fitting because we’ve made so many of these rose gardens in the KAL.

When I finished knitting the original last fall, I had a lot of yarn left from my 4 ounce/115g/475 yard skeins. I knew that I would want to give options for extending the shawlette. At the same time, the pattern had to work with less yardage too, since many fingering weight yarns are put up in 100g skeins.

Our recent snowy Portland weekend was perfect for getting my knit on. This is Midnight in Rosaria. I’ve added extra roses to the second set of stripes. Another option would be to just extend the stripes. Or you could add more leaves near the end. As long as you don’t add more than about 20 more rows after the last set of increases, the pi construction works. Technically, you could add a few more, but that puts a lot of stretch on the outer band of leaves.

Mookie helped me block it.

I added beads. A lot of beads. I still have 36g of the darker MC left, and 48g of the CC, so I could have made it a little larger. But I didn’t want to stretch out the leaves too much near the end.

Leading this KAL has been one of the most fun knitterly things I’ve done! The camaraderie of the Ravelry forum has been great, and I still have the Yarn Ball and the actual Yarn Crawl itself February 27 – March 2 coming up. It will be so cool to see all these shawlettes in person.

Did you participate in the KAL? Are you going on the crawl? Hope to see you! But first, I’ll be at Madrona this weekend, with Rosaria and other favorite knits.